SEMINAR 4

The two lectures I'd like you to listen to were given by Jennifer Burns at Berkeley:

• Immigrant culture
• Meaning of whiteness.

You can download them from the Berkeley website.

You can get them from i-tunes by typing "History 7B Berkeley" in the search engine, or by browsing through i-tunes U.

The two lectures were also on the memory sticks that I circulated in class, so some of you already have them on your computers.

PS : An excellent article on the Tea Party from the liberal magazine The New Republic. I found the first ( and so far only) comment particularly perceptive. For the mediatic row over "the elites", see the original article in the Washington Post and one of the reactions it provoked.

Bill of rights

Here is a very good example of the current significance of the Bill of Rights :




This is an extract from The West Wing, season 6, episode 8 (In the room)

I whole heartedly reccomend this TV series which is amazing : you'll learn a lot about the American constitution, the political workings of the institutions and the hot potato issues of the 2000s, and painlessly to boot.

Seminar 3

To help you answer the third question for SEMINAR 3 : read about the Supreme Court's recent cases.

As mentionned last week, I've added an exercise on the Tea Party movement for seminar 3.

Please listen to the BBC podcast from BBC's Americana series.

If you'd rather download the podcast, I've uploaded it here.

Answer these questions briefly :

1. Summarize the Tea-Party activists' platform.

2. How do they view the Constitution ?

3. What does Professor Jill Lepore say about this?

for more on the Tea Party movement :

• a very brief presentation of Jill Lepore's book click here
• a very long article in the New Yorker
• coverage by NPR on religion and the Tea Party Movement

Note :

Fiscal conservative = against high taxes and the deficit and opposed to government spending to fund social services.

Social conservative= against abortion, gay marriage, secularization of American society (bans on school prayers etc...)

Tea Party, past and present

Today a national group of anti-tax, anti-Big Government and anti-incumbent activists has coalesced under the banner of the Tea Party Movement in reference to the original Boston Tea Party of 1775. ( For more information on this, you may check my earlier posts on this : http://americanstudiesyear2.blogspot.com/2010/03/right-wing-extremism-in-us.html

These vocal critics of the governement have been referring to the American founders in their wish to take power back, that is away from the federal government. They have used the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to argue for a return to the original American institutional framework. Was the Constitution truly the work of people who distrusted the State and favoured democracy?

The Economist offers an interesting study of the constitutional rhetoric of these Tea Party activists : The perils of Constitution worship. This passage is particularly relevant :

But many of the tea-partiers have invented a strangely ahistorical version of it. For example, they say that the framers’ aim was to check the central government and protect the rights of the states. In fact the constitution of 1787 set out to do the opposite: to bolster the centre and weaken the power the states had briefly enjoyed under the new republic’s Articles of Confederation of 1777.

If we look back to the debates about the Constitution and the nationwide discussion that took place during the nine month ratification process, it is pretty clear that the Constitution was defended by a group of people who wanted a powerful central government.

Today's Tea Party movement would certainly have sided with the Anti-Federalists who argued against ratification. Our "modern-day anti-federalists" have picked a strange fight !